The five year old just figured out what his mother and I were talking about even though we were spelling the event in question.
One more step on the road of parental doom ….
Commenter persimmon, here:
It’s not my delicate sensibilities that were offended. It’s the delicate sensibilities of the right-wing bedwetters desperate to justify the thousands of dead soldiers and trillion dollars sacrificed pacifying their irrational fears. Since the “war on terror” has been one miserable failure after another, they’re eager to glom onto any slim justification for their diapers.
The notion that every newspaper and TV station in Utah is in cahoots with the national media is so monstrously stupid it is literal proof of the irrationality of which I speak. Is the local media in possibly the most conservative state in the union part of the vast left-wing media cabal? Did they all get the PC memos about how to coddle Muslims? Is every reporter in America trained ahead of time to not say “Muslim” so the entire media can snap into conspiracy mode at a moment’s notice?
Or was the media merely focused on the immediacy of victims and events and witnesses before turning its attention to the dead shooter’s motivations? Were they a bit distracted by all the people and officials on the scene when they should have been hunting down the shooter’s family on the odd chance they could turn a crime bearing all the markings of an adolescent freak out into a battle scene in a global religious war?
Shouldn’t the media be coddling halfwits desperate to not be Left Behind instead of halfwits desperate to cash in on their 72 virgins? This is America after all, and if we let 9/11 change us, the terrorists will have already, um, um. I forget, how did that go? My delicate sensibilities seem to have blocked it from my mind.
Go support this. They intend to:
The bill will restore Habeas Corpus protections to detainees, bar information acquired through torture from being introduced as evidence in trials, and limit presidential authority to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions.
You know, those little things that the American Revolution was fought over and the US has supposedly been fighting to defend for the last two hundred odd years. Little, unimportant things like that. Easily overlooked, apparently, in the heat of the moment. Common mistake, happens all the time. I am sure that once the GOP and Bush have this little faux paus pointed out to them, then everything will be taken care of. This bill is certainly just a formality.
Christ, how did we get to the point where we had to defend against official torture and the government locking people away forever without charge or trial? Go back Dodd and remind people that America is supposed to be better than this.
A state legislature in Nashville wants to give death certificates for abortions:
Legislation introduced in Tennessee would require death certificates for aborted fetuses …
Rep. Stacey Campfield, a Republican, said his bill would provide a way to track how many abortions are performed.
The legislature, is, of course, lying about the state needing the information:
The number of abortions reported to the state Office of Vital Records is already publicly available. The office collects records–but not death certificates–on abortions and the deaths of fetuses after 22 weeks’ gestation or weighing about 1 pound.
So what’s the purpose? Well, aside form the insincere (yes, insincere. If this person actually thought aborted fetuses were life, he would do what the legislature in South Dakota did: introduce a ban on abortion with no exceptions. Actually, he would go farther: he would set punishments equal to first degree murder for abortion providers and women who have them. Anything less, and he doesn’t actually think fetuses are life. Alternatively, he could be advocating for comprehensive, free birth control and massive economic assistance for poor pregnant women. since he takes neither of the two serious tracks for limiting abortions, he cannot possible be serious about thinking fetuses are life.) grandstanding, the death certificate would have information that made it easy to identify the women who had abortions:
… which likely would create public records identifying women who have abortions.
… The identities of the women who have abortions are not included in those records, but death certificates include identifying information such as Social Security numbers.
That’s right: Campfield’s bill will make it easier to find woman who have abortions. So, for example, it will be easier for someone to tell your boss that you had an abortion. It will be easier for someone to tell your parents you had an abortion. It will be be easier for someone to tell your abusive husband that you had an abortion. It will be easier for people like Operation Rescue to picket your home or place of work. It will be easier for one of those nice Christian fellows who kills abortion providers to find you. And this will happen. Once this information is available, it will be trivial to link it to women and then to those women’s addresses, employers, etc. Once its trivial, its almost guaranteed that someone — perhaps like the sick f*ckers who run the sites that target abortion doctors for death — will attempt to intimidate these women. And all it takes is one case to act as a club against women who are trying to end their pregnancies.
Campfield, doesn’t have, apparently, the compassion to provide women with the economic and educational help that has been shown to reduce abortions. Campfield also doesn’t actually have the guts to come out and take real action against abortions and abortion providers and criminalize them and the women they serve. Instead he introduces this bill that provides no information the state doesn’t already have except for that information that would make it possible for the public to find out who has had an abortion. Considering his refusal to take one of the two serious tracks to attempting to stop abortions, one is left with the conclusion that Campfield intends his bill to be used as a means of intimidation.
Apparently, a few women suffering severe health complications, or losing their jobs, or being thrust into poverty, or getting beat up, or getting killed doesn’t rally matter all that much to Campfield. If actual lives meant more to Campfield than cheap political grandstanding, then he wouldn’t have introduced a bill that makes such outcomes so very much easier.
John Amaechi is getting death threats, according to the radio this morning. Before last week, no one knew who John Amaechi was. I follow the NBA, could probably name you fifty players right now, off the top of my head, and I had no idea who Amaechi was. I still have no idea who he played for, which should give you some idea of how insignificant his playing career actually was. But now he is getting death threats. What has changed? Now he is out of the closest. And some people don’t like it at all:
You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known,” Hardaway said. “I don’t like gay people and I don’t like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be in the world or in the United States.”
Hardaway doesn’t hate the sin, he hates the sinners, to borrow a phrase. He thinks they should not exist in the world. The difference between Hardaway and someone making a death death threat is one of difference, not one of kind. They both want to see Amaechi go away, they both hate him for what he is, and they both don’t think that homosexuals should have any place in the NBA or the world. Hardaway just isn’t homicidal.
But he is a bigot and a hater.
There will be people who defend Hardaway’s comments — heck, based on the email the talk show I was listening to this morning received, there already are — based on religious scriptures. That is ludicrous. First, the case for Homosexuality being a sin is ludicrously thin. To be blunt, to consider homosexuality in and off itself a sin, you have to want homosexuality to be a sin. Second, homosexuality engenders reactions that are completely disproportionate to its place in the Bible. There are perhaps six passages that even obliquely mention homosexuality in the entire Bible. Jesus Christ never mentions homosexuality at all. There is a Gospel of the Poor, but no Gospel of the Homo Hating.
And yet it sometimes appears that the entire Religious Right is based around two things and two things only: abortion and homosexuality. Abortion I can understand. If you believe that a fetus is a life, then you should try your best to get rid of abortions. But homosexuality? Does a thing that is hardly mention in the Bible and that probably shouldn’t even be considered a sin really take up so much time? Does something that Jesus apparently cared so little about really deserve to be the focus of so much commentary and work by the religious right?
This si not about religion or God’s word. If they were concerned with God’s word, they would spend more time focusing on the things Jesus actually spoke about, and they would condemn those who work to keep people poor or refuse to help provide the enough to make sure no one starves or dies of exposure in the same harsh terms they reserve for homosexuality. That they do not, that they reserve the worst of their vitriol for the least of Biblical issues is telling.
“I hate gay people” says Tim Hardaway. He is not alone, unfortunately, and, even more unfortunately, too much of American Christianity has become a vessel for that mindless, un-Biblical hate.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
